As a creative copywriter and PR & marketing strategist, I work closely with businesses to enhance their communications and optimize their engagement with their audience.
I recently made the tough but important decision to scale back on my social media services, encouraging companies to bring that aspect of their content marketing in-house.
While social media is certainly an important part of communicating with your customers and community-at-large, here's why I recommend that you should directly manage your social media as opposed to outsourcing.
Editorial calendars lack dynamism.I may get slack for making a statement like this, but I wholeheartedly believe that part of the beauty of social media is the impromptu, dynamic engagement. Planning posts in advance creates a one-way, static conversation, which is the antithesis of the rules of engagement of social networking.
Nobody knows your business like you do.The key to engaging is by keeping your ear to the ground and finger on the pulse at all times. This is easier managed by you and your team because you can monitor the ongoing updates and happenings of your business, both online and off.
It's important to stay in touch and interact with your audience all the time, and you'll likely find that your long-term scheduled posts may no longer be relevant when the time comes to post them down the road.
Who has the juicy content? You do!Chances are, your company, and certainly your industry, is changing all the time with post-worthy updates and developments. I can tell you that you'll know about it long before any consultant who works with multiple clients will. You'll save a lot more time by sharing and monitoring news and updates in-house.
Having said that, I do believe there are tremendous benefits consultants like me can add. I just think it's important to be realistic about what is worth outsourcing versus managing in-house. Blogging is a great example.
Strategically speaking, blog posts are meant to keep a longer shelf life than status updates. Having someone create your blog content for you can dramatically enhance your online efforts, as well as give you the flexibility to tweak content rather than create it from scratch.
3 reasons you should manage your own social media
